Bioware On Mass Effect Andromeda's Multiplayer, Mods And Open Worlds

Just before Christmas, I had the opportunity to chat over the phone with Bioware producer Mike Gamble about the direction of Mass Effect: Andromeda. And while most of Andromeda's juicier systems won't be unveiled until next month, he did have some interesting bits of information.

One of the biggest changes with Andromeda has been the integration of the multiplayer. Players were encouraged, or strongly urged, to give multiplayer a go to improve their readiness rating in Mass Effect 3.

But while the co-op missions were entertaining in their own right, it was a strange decision for people who expressly want to enjoy Mass Effect alone - or gamers in remote locations who can't or don't have the option of being able to play multiplayer.

Fortunately, that won't be a problem in Andromeda.

Gamble confirmed that while Andromeda would ship with a "Strike Team" system that was a fundamental part of the multiplayer experience, progression in the multiplayer wasn't required to progress the story.

"There's a system that we use called the Strike Team system, and fundamentally it allows you to go between singleplayer and multiplayer within the game," he explained. "And it's packaged around a meta-story of what's going on in Helios."

The producer added that the multiplayer would feed into a deeper meta-story. The meta-story can be finished without playing multiplayer at all, but Gamble said "it's pretty seamless" to switch between the singleplayer and multiplayer.

When I pressed further, he told me the transition wasn't instantaneous - but you also won't have to quit out to the main menu, like you did with Mass Effect 3. "I can tell you that there's a loading screen - it's not entirely seamless - but it won't require you to stop your game and restart in a different mode. Because narratively it's all connected, it makes a lot of sense."

Image: Bioware/EA

With Andromeda only a few months away, I couldn't help but ask: why wait until 2016 was practically over to start revealing details, let alone footage? Was Bioware influenced by what happened with other games - say, No Man's Sky, or the way Fallout was marketed?

"We could have started talking about the game and showed a lot more a lot earlier, but it was a choice not to," Gamble said. "And you mention games like Fallout, we really respect that way of showing things where you stay relatively quiet and then you're able to surprise and delight players with a whole bunch of information in a short time."

It makes sense given how much noise there was this year: virtual reality, the release of new consoles, the reveal of other consoles, controversies, and everything in between. Waiting until 2016 is done gives Bioware a lot of fresh air.

Take January. There's nothing major scheduled for release, and if you take the Nintendo Switch's presentation on January 13 out of the picture it's basically free reign for Andromeda. (It's also a month the series has occupied before, with Mass Effect 2 launching in January 2010.)

Image: Bioware

Gamble also provided a few details about how Andromeda would play on PC. The first major one: the game will ship with an unlocked frame rate and support for ultrawide screen monitors, which should please anyone who's converted to a 21:9 world. The developer is targeting day 1 drivers out for Andromeda - Gamble didn't specifically say AMD or NVIDIA, but he said Bioware had been working with "some of the manufacturers" on a couple of things.

Given that there really only two manufacturers in the business - AMD and NVIDIA - it's interesting that Gamble didn't just expressly mention them by name. It's something to keep an eye on in the coming months, however, especially if Andromeda has any launch issues with drivers like several games in 2016 did.

There won't be any official support for mods with Andromeda either, although Gamble remarked that "as we see the reaction to these things those plans can change very quickly". Given the good work the modding community did with the original Mass Effect trilogy - the high-res texture packs are just one of many things that come to mind, not to mention all the mods for Bioware games of old - I wouldn't be surprised if there was movement on this later this year, although it could be a case where Bioware offers their tacit approval without releasing an official toolkit.

Something else worth noting: Andromeda won't have dedicated servers for multiplayer. That's not a huge surprise given the type of game Mass Effect is, but it could be a sticking point for those who want to dive deep into the game's multiplayer - especially if Andromeda ends up having some form of a competitive mode, as opposed to the wave-based, co-operative offering in ME3.

Image: Kotaku

Perhaps the other interesting tidbit from our chat was how Bioware is shelling out Andromeda's worlds. Mass Effect has always relied on the creation of lively environments, from characters interacting on the deck of the Normandy, the political chatter around the Citadel or the bustling spaceports through the universe. But the environments have always been fixed - there's plenty to discover, but it's never been an open-world.

Andromeda is - at least in parts. Players will be able to explore planets on foot or on wheels, and Gamble told me there would be a variety of little adventures - not necessarily quest-related - for people to uncover.

"We have designers going throughout these open worlds and placing small little adventures, small little bits of narrative and visual story telling that we hope the players will explore to find," he explained. "They're not career path stuff, they're not even usually side quest stuff, they're little self-contained things. They're for the folks who want to go every square meter of a planet, they're going to get a lot of enjoyment about that.

"You'll see like a couple chrome corpses, a couple ... corpses, you'll look around that area, pull your scanner up, you'll find out that, 'Oh shit, something bad happened here' and that was the result of that firefight is and this is why they did that. Maybe it'll point you to somewhere else on the planet; maybe it'll just end there. But we have those kind of things and we hope that players really enjoy those."

We'll hear more about what Andromeda is doing next month, both from Bioware and as people get invited into the multiplayer.

sans DLC it was very hard and pre patch it was very hard to get the "secret" ending.

you basically had to have done specific things either in ME1 / 2 (so either new minor quests pop up in ME3 or straight up import bonus) or reacted to conversations out in the world in a specific manor to get all the necessary points.

if you had the day one DLC (for the prothean), you basically got another system which all amounted to something close to 100 points.

there was also that stupid mobile game too... which I think is now dead

The Galaxy at War game is still alive and well on their N7HQ website, no longer requiring the mobile to use. It's useful, albeit slow-to-load for some reason, as it means you can bypass some of the more pointless side-quests/exploration that are obviously there just for some additional assets.

In the vanilla game, at release, multiplayer was mandatory to unlock the Shepard Lives ending, as there was literally not enough points attainable to achieve it without doing at least a few rounds, even with the preorder/collectors DLC and a near-perfect save import. Everything else could be done though, assuming a comprehensive playthrough (or basic, depending on what you were going for). Once the Extended Cut came out, everything was on the table and multiplayer returned to being an optional extra even for completionists (or it might have been after the first round of additional DLC, I forget which)

All the endings were terrible, irrespective of your battle readiness. But yes I agree, locking the alternate endings behind Multiplayer was a fairly large dick move on EA/Bioware's part.

In any case, I recently finished reading the Mass Effect Retrospective by Shamus Young. Suffice to say, it wasn't just the endings of 3 that sucked. Basically the entire story of ME was ruined from the beginning of 2 onwards.

Nice write up Alex,
Im a huge ME fan with the series up in my top 3 of all time.
Id really like more of an influence with the Renegade / Paragon system as im sick to death of playing as the good guys, the Illusive man was really on to something before the space shit hit the space fan.

Keeping their cards close to their chest leading up to the release is the right move. I can distinctly remember how in awe I was of the Watch Dogs reveal trailer. But by the time it was actually released, I had seen so much of the game that my enthusiasm for it had completely waned. Less announcements years before release, more of what Fallout 4 and hopefully Mass Effect: Andromeda are doing.

damn, reading the title i was hoping he would have a bit more info about mods. I dont expect them to have a mod kit or even officially support mods, but it would be nice if they could just make it a bit easier to mod for the new mass effect, i heard it was very (and somewhat unnecessarily) difficult to do for the original 3.

Good idea checking DA:I i didnt think of that.
After looking i am a bit happier about our possibilities for ME:A. Mass effect 3 has about 350 mods and came out in 2012, DA:I has 1250 mods and came out in 2014, so it appears it must be a fair bit easier to mod for. Plus looking at the mods it appears there is a wider range of texture mods and even a body mesh changing mod which definitely never happened in ME. Hopefully that means more mods for ME:A . I'll just be waiting for the day someone figures out how to replace all ME:A squadmates with ones from the orginal trilogy because you know thats going to be someones first idea.

If any one thing about The Last Jedi has been contentious -- actually, no, strike that, everything about The Last Jedi has been contentious, including its approach to space combat (the Holdo Manoeuvre, anyone?). But according to one fan and critic, Rian Johnson's epic actually makes space combat in the Star Wars universe more explicable, not less.